Web searches help spread the holiday cheer
Here are some stocking stuffers to tide you over until New Year’s Day if you’re stuck at home.
Elf Yourself is a hilariously ingenious creation whose only negatives are caused by its popularity. Upload an image of your face, and it’s believably pasted onto the body of a live-action Santa’s elf. Give it a few tweaks, and then watch as your elf self shimmies and shakes to a jazzy rendition of “Jingle Bells.” The dance moves are outrageously funny, especially with your face planted atop the gyrating elf. Because of the traffic the site generates, it can load slowly and be balky during sessions. Worse, on a recent visit, the function to send your creation to a friend simply generated an e-mail message with a general link to the site. But the results are worth the effort, even if you have to gather people around your computer screen, so stick with it.
Minnesotan Jesse Vig has the whole world in his hands with his clever new Web site, geoGreeting. Type in any message up to 40 characters, and geoGreeting will compose the words using letter-shaped buildings and other geographical features from satellite maps of the Earth. E-mail a link to your friends, and they’ll see an animated version of your message. There are even pop-up locators to answer the question, “Where on Earth did you come up with that?”
Even if there’s no snow in sight, you can create your own with Make-a-Flake, a charming interactive feature that allows you to cut a virtual sheet of folded paper into an artful snowflake just as you did in grade school. There’s even an undo function for those times when you make a disastrous swipe of the scissors. Preview your project to see if you like it, and then add your creation to the Web site’s gallery, download it or e-mail it to a friend.
www.brew-creative. com/letter.html
Twin Cities advertising guru Bruce Bildsten is behind a captivating video that was posted Wednesday on the Web but will probably have spread to thousands of e-mail in-boxes and Web sites by the time you read this. Called “The Letter,” it shows a soldier in Iraq sitting in the desert sand, enjoying a brief, dreamy respite before being called back to join his comrades. He gets up to reveal that his imprint has made an angel in the sand. And then the simple words are displayed: “Peace on Earth.”